Kao is a leading manufacturer of professional hair care products, aimed particularly at hairdressing salons and salon owners. The Japanese company’s German business was created with the takeover of Goldwell in Darmstadt in 1989. In Germany, Kao is known for numerous other brands in addition to Goldwell, such as KMS, Oribe, and John Frieda. With a permanent field sales team, the company sells its professional products and relies on innovative communication strategies to effectively reach the target group.

With the introduction of Flinkit in 2024, Kao has significantly improved its sales communication. Previously, WhatsApp was only used via the personal cell phones of the field sales staff, which was not data protection compliant and inefficient. With Flinkit, the company can now centrally control its WhatsApp communication and synchronize customer data in accordance with the GDPR. This enables asynchronous communication, which shortens response times and improves collaboration between field sales, office sales, and the “educator” team.

Particularly noteworthy for Kao is the sending of WhatsApp newsletters via Flinkit, which achieves open rates of over 90% and brings Kao an average revenue of €4.75 per message.

Kao Germany was faced with three challenges. First, a more effective marketing channel was sought. Until now, Kao relied on conventional channels such as email and post. Kao places various types of messages with customers: special offers play an important role, but event invitations and product news should also be noticed by customers.

Sales was already using WhatsApp because the target group of salon owners insisted on actively chatting with their contacts on WhatsApp. However, WhatsApp was officially prohibited due to data protection concerns. In addition, only the field staff could chat with customers, which often led to chaos. The field staff often agreed an order with the customer via WhatsApp. The office staff was then responsible for processing the order (creating an order in the inventory management system). However, since office staff did not have their own cell phones, they could not receive WhatsApp messages. This meant that the field staff then sent screenshots of the customer chat to the office staff by email. However, the email attachments could not be searched and were difficult to trace afterwards.

Recently, Kao Germany had the goal of increasing the proportion of online orders, especially among smaller customers, in order to save capacity in the field service.

By introducing Flinkit, all three challenges were overcome.

A WhatsApp newsletter was set up with Flinkit to provide salon owners with marketing messages. The newsletter was enthusiastically received by customers, as salon owners spend most of their working time not at their desks, but on activities in the salon (cutting hair, caring for customers, etc.). A WhatsApp message received on a cell phone is therefore much more likely to reach the salon owner than other advertising media.

The success of the WhatsApp newsletter is reflected above all in the high opening rate. At an average of over 90%, this is far higher than on any other marketing channel. Kao regularly sends offers, event invitations, etc. via Flinkit.

Kao relies on the opt-out procedure in accordance with Section 7 Paragraph 3 of the German Act Against Unfair Competition. This means that the newsletter was simply sent to professional customers from the start without an opt-in being obtained beforehand. According to the current legal opinion, this is permissible for existing customers in accordance with the aforementioned paragraph, provided that customers are informed how they can unsubscribe from the newsletter. Flinkit offers an automatic opt-out function, which means that customers can easily unsubscribe from the newsletter mailing list by replying “Stop” (or a similar, freely definable word) via WhatsApp.

Since launching Flinkit in 2024, Kao has revolutionized its sales communications. Previously, WhatsApp was only used via the personal cell phones of field staff, which was not data protection compliant and inefficient. With Flinkit, the company can now centrally control its WhatsApp communications and synchronize customer data in compliance with GDPR. This enables asynchronous communication that shortens response times and improves collaboration between field staff, office staff and the “educator” team.

WhatsApp newsletter campaigns on Flinkit can always be sent to exactly the right recipients using target group management. Kao was thus able to significantly increase the proportion of online orders from smaller customers.

The marketing team proceeded as follows. Firstly, the target group characteristic “Small Customer” was imported into Flinkit. The corresponding customers can then be selected as recipients for the newsletter campaign. Secondly, a voucher code with a discount was created in the B2B shop. The code was highlighted in bold in the newsletter message. Finally, the message with the voucher code was sent to the small customers. Thanks to the high opening rates of the campaign, the message was read by 92% of the recipients, and an average of 15% then used the voucher code. The proportion of online orders increased by 11% in the month of the campaign.

For Kao, Flinkit is the most important digital channel for better retaining existing customers and increasing sales with them. Thanks to Flinkit, communication in sales has accelerated and WhatsApp has become a real competitive advantage.